/dev/fort is band camp for geeks. It is a week away from the rest of the world to learn, to think, to play and to build. The aim is to make something—it could be a website, a game or a world-conquering robot—from scratch, in a week.

But it is equally about enjoying the company and the scenery, a working holiday. Past forts have seen people exploring World War II tunnels, raising the property’s flag each morning to the sound of a bugle, swimming out to deserted islands and investigating medieval artefacts.

Forts happen in isolated locations; a castle or other fortifiable structure (in an emergency we can use pillows) usually in an area of outstanding natural beauty, sometimes when it’s freezing cold.

/dev/forts are enjoyable for many reasons, including:

a holiday somewhere beautiful

a chance to geek out for an entire week without anyone judging you

proper home-cooked food instead of take-out for a week

the challenge of trying to build something in about five days

the opportunity to work with, and learn from, people with different skills and knowledge from yourself

spending a week in a fort (but castles and country homes can be substituted for forts as necessary and are almost as awesome)

Later, they decided that Fort Clonque would make a great venue for an event that they had talked about running for a while—a kind of extended Hack Day, allowing time to build something more ambitious with a larger group of people.

The first event was jokingly named “Super Evil Dev Fort” (inspired by SuperHappyDevHouse). The name stuck, but we decided to be less (explicitly) evil later.